Posted in: Podcasting

This week one of my favorite improv groups, TJ & Dave, are on my favorite podcast, Radiolab. It is fascinating.

When TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi get on stage they introduce themselves, work the crowd a bit … and then, the lights go off. And when the lights come back on, they’re just standing there, staring at each other. The audience is waiting, wondering what’s going to happen. And so are TJ and Dave.

Are you kidding me? A real honest to blog (joke!) Tracks Up The Tree? This must be some sort of mistake right? I mean… Funtime Ben and Just Josiah are dead right? Or are they?

Yes, yes. Get it out now before you’ve heard the thing. It’s TUTT. Back again for yet another stretch. and you thought we abandoned you? PSHAW! You know the drill, it’s talk about not podcasting, Josiah, girlfriends, cats and a smidge of that old time indie music. Hope you guys enjoy.

So, the new show is up. It’s been up for a while. Unfortunately our podcast host LibSyn, who are normally very reliable, screwed up and the show could not be downloaded.

This was both very frustrating and went unnoticed for 2 days.

Needless to say, we’re very sorry that the show didn’t hit people ears on St. Patty’s day and we hope to get this all worked out for future shows. We are also directing you all to the new website if you’d like to leave comments or download the show manually.

I know most of you must be thinking, this guy has some nerve. talking to us without a podcast in hand, but let me assure you I have a podcast up my sleeve and t make matters worse, I think I may have figured out a way to do more of them in the future.

In an attempt to shake things up here up the tree and to give Josiah and I a chance to have things happen to us to talk about on the show, I headed down to Philly to visit our long time podcast friends Seth and Jessica at WHYME.

The show notes are at the end of the podcast… and really I can’t remember what the hell we played cuz I was drunk (shocking right?!)

Thanks again for Seth and Jess for having me and cutting this show up.

On the subject of improvements to the show Josiah and I have been thinking about releasing a iTunes only MP4 podcast feed with artwork and chapters. We just wanted to get your opinion. Is the current standard MP3 golden? Should we bother?

For posterity’s sake, I thought I would post the snippet about the show from Entertainment weekly (It’s in this week’s [8/26/05 edition] Entertainment Weekly page 61) and post it on the site. (Thanks Arnold for the cutting) Notice what the iPod is playing?

Copyright (c) 2005 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc.

Thanks again to all you listeners and contributors to the show! You guys rock!

Occasionally there may be a time when you really don’t want to publish all the MP3s of a post in your RSS feed. Unfortunately WordPress will not allow you to remove an MP3 it’s linked to. To be more accurate WordPress will always link to all available media files every time you press *Save.*

This becomes a huge issue when you are recording a podcast and linking to various MP3s you might have played during the course of a show. However with the addition of one letter to one line on one page of your WordPress installation you too can be enclosure free… and by free, I mean you will from this point on never have WordPress enclosing files even if you want them. You may of course manually enclose files, but this may problematic for some people.

# Find the folder in your WordPress Installation named *wp-includes*
# open the file in that folder named *functions.php*
# Scroll down to line 766 which starts preg_match_all and edit the bit that should have *http* and make it now read *httpp*
# Save the file and upload to your server.

*What did I just do?* Well, in effect you have told WordPress only to enclose files which start with httpp://www.yaddayadda…… and since no link can ever be on a server that starts httpp it will never include a file.

*It’s ugly, but it works.*

p(note). This hack has been tested with WordPress 1.5.x Please be cautious of modifying your WordPress code and always have a backup in the wings. I take no responsibility for broken sites.